DEATH OF A POET
REJECTED NOVEMBER 2002
Helen Hulskamp found the body. He was slumped over his writing notebook. A pen had rolled from the desk onto the floor. Tchaikovsky was playing on a loop. Her mentor and friend, William Packard, was dead.
Hulskamp, 30, is a slim, dark-haired woman with a firm mouth and liquid brown eyes. She's a poet who earns her keep as a computer systems administrator and feeds her muse with summer workshops in Iowa and winter classes at NYU. That's where she met Packard, the wheelchair-bound, foul-mouthed poet, playwright, teacher, and founder of what was once New York most prestigious poetry magazine, the New York Quarterly.
A man of extraordinary good looks in his youth and barely muted vigor in his old age, Packard founded the New York Quarterly in 1970 and ran it with the help of a group of cultural luminaries so bright they kept the magazine glittering for almost 25 years. W.H. Auden was on the magazine's board, as were Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Robert Lowell, Otto Preminger, Leonard Bernstein, Jose Ferrar, Alan Houseman, and Robert Penn Warren. Charles Bukowski was a particular favorite; the quarterly had been one of the first and staunchest supports of his work.
But when Hulskamp entered Packard's world last winter, the poet was in bad shape. Paralyzed from a stroke in 1996, he hadn't been able to get the magazine out in six years. Funds, never good in the best of times, were nil, and the man who'd once driven students to fits of poetic ecstasy with his in-class theatrics was reduced to depending on others to get up and down the stairs of his 14th Street apartment.
Hulskamp, whose small size and quiet demeanor should not be mistaken for a mouse-ish nature, moved from the ranks of extended education students to trusted confidante when, on the last day of class, Packard asked her if she would take him to his favorite diner one night that week. Many a time Hulskamp had watched her teacher wheeled off by a teenager with a wispy goatee who waited at the door for him after class.
"I used to watch them go and wish I had the nerve to invite myself along," Hulskamp said. "But Bill terrified me. He could be brutal, pounding on the table, shouting. Once I cheated and turned in a poem I had written four years earlier. His first comment was 'When did you write this poem? Four years ago?' He had these stamps made up that said things like 'generality', which he'd stamp all over your work. But when he returned your poem, there would be a full page of comments stapled to it - careful comments - that he'd typed out with his one good arm."
Packard's apartment, which he'd inhabited for 30 years, was as terrifying as the man himself, Hulskamp recalls. It was as dark as a cave, with brown painted walls and shaggy leopard print fabric hanging over the windows. His desk contained a boom box, a pile of notebooks, and a tin of pencils. The walls were filled with rows of books, rebound by Packard himself in brown leather. Skulls -"fake, I hoped" - lined his shelves. A huge mask of Homer loomed beside the doorway. His bed was a single metal hospital cot about five feet from his desk with a faded American flag covering the lone pillow.
At dinner, Packard horrified her with a Freudian analysis of one of her poems, using words that "would have made a gynecologist blush," and delivered in a near bellow at a diner on 7th Avenue. Then he called over a Greek orthodox priest who was having a cup of coffee at the counter and asked him if he'd heard the joke about how to get nuns pregnant. (Dress them up like altar boys.) "I thought I was going to die," Hulskamp said. "But it turned out he was a friend of Bill's. In fact, he's speaking at the memorial service."
After dinner, Packard insisted that Hulskamp read poetry aloud to him, his, hers, Homer's. "I was mortified," Hulskamp said. "But it's also what every poet wants: to read their work to someone paying rapt attention. For a long time I felt that would be the high point of my career as a poet."
From then on, Hulskamp visited Packard in his 400-square-foot one-room apartment weekly, listening to him rhapsodize about Yeats and rail against MFA programs, averting her eyes when, unannounced, he relieved himself in a plastic bottle kept under his desk.
It was Hulskamp, who inspired Packard to re-launch the New York Quarterly. Of course, there was also the matter of a promise he'd made in 1994 to his old friend, Charles Bukowski, as he lay dying of leukemia.
" 'Packard, I'm going, but you're staying,' " Packard quoted Bukowski. " 'Promise me that you'll keep the NYQ mag going because someone's got to fight those bastards.' "
The bastards were the MFA programs, lack luster critics, and what he called the "scruffy, poesy magazines" of contemporary poetry. Packard came of age in the era of Howl (Alan Ginsberg was a teacher and friend in San Francisco in the 1960s), when heavy drinking, sexual exploration and dirty living were the stuff that made poets' hearts beat. Even in the last days of his life, he railed against what he saw as a lack of emotion in modern poetry. He longed for a return to what he called 'excellence,' and pushed students to tears berating them to think less and feel more. "Teaching poetry is like open heart surgery," Packard said.
With Hulskamp on board, New York Quarterly issue number 58 finally came together. Another of Packard's small entourage, Raymond Hammond, a 35-year-old a security guard for the Statue of Liberty and an aspiring poet, found an investor, and with her computer skills, Hulskamp laid out the magazine and streamlined production and sales. Packard teased her about her high tech ways, but was impressed by things like multiple font choices and multi-color printing.
The group was rounded out by the teenager she'd watched wheel her teacher away after class all those months ago, Malachi Black, a precocious New Jersey transplant who'd been putting in two days a week with Mr. Packard since he was 14. Chain smoking in straight-backed chairs in a semi circle around Packard, the three disciples poured through the submissions (defunct though it was, the magazine was still receiving several thousand submissions a year), listened to Tchaikovsky, and talked about poetry.
On October 29th, a Tuesday, the final copies of the New York Quarterly issue number 58 arrived at Hulskamp's Queens apartment in a 700-pound cardboard box. She sent a copy to Packard by express mail. Four days later, a box with a hundred copies under her arm, she took a cab into the city to her mentor's apartment, just a few hours too late. When Black arrived, his first question was if Packard had seen issue number 58. They hunted through the apartment but could not find the magazine.
"I burst into tears," Hulskamp said. "Bill used to joke that he could die once this issue came out. But to think that he hadn't even had a chance to feel triumphant - that was too awful."
Two days later, Hulskamp received a note, dated Nov. 1. It was from Packard.
"Helen, I read through NYQ #58, cover to cover," the note read, "and found the most marvelous astonishing thing about it was not the lovely 4 color cover and formatting and variant type styles (excellent as they all are) but the poems themselves...the poems show a diversity of finesse and mastery that is so rare (or non existent) in contemporary poetry today. Thank you."
– HEATHER CHAPLIN
Originally Posted by Agni
I like Si but I think in another universe I wouldn't mind living w/o it.
"
-PoLR
-PoLR
-PoLR
-PoLR
-PoLR
or
polr. But the combination of the polr and other functions makes a big difference to me. Being SLI seems awesome, but the other Fe polr - ILI - is one of the types I'd want to be the least. It seems like the strong sensing allows SLIs to be more confident and socially non-awkward than what ILIS tend to be, for example. And ime the strong Ne in IEEs generally makes them really open-minded/curious for alternative ways of thinking and thus less unyielding about their logically incoherent beliefs than SEEs, etc.
polr seems the worst to me, a lot of them come across as narrow-minded and judgmental to me. Most Ne polrs I know irl are also quite conservative in their beliefs, even if they appear otherwise. And I tend to find their responses rather predictable, which makes it a bit boring..
as PoLR everyday. Don't like it, don't want it, don't think it's so nice to have it (expect in some rare instances). That also gives me my beloved
!
). I'm also okay with overreacting to aggressions, confrontations or being picked on: those things shouldn't happen in the first place. I'm okay with diverting all my Sensing towards myself - and reaping the benefits of it.
(trust me, little to no control on your emotion and inability to evaluate relationships sucks big time - talking from experience here. Makes you vulnerable to mood shifts, being used by evil ethicals and in general failing at letting people go).
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